
PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUSIBIA UNIVERSITY 



JS'ew Y<5i*k 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1908 



PHILOSOPHY 



A LECTURE DELIVERED AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

IN THE SERIES ON SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND ART 

MARCH 4, 1908 



Copyright, 1908, 
By THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



Set up, and published March, 1908. 




PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1908 



JLiBKARY of CON'Jrp:E-|st' 

I Iwo Copies Hecwv.>. I kO'WA.V 

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SYLLABUS 

The desire of knowledge and the wonder of man, 5 — The my- 
thologies, 6 — Beginnings of critical inquiry, 7 — The significance 
of Socrates, 8. 

The three stages or orders of thinking : common knowledge, sci- 
ence, philosophy, 9 — Characteristics of common knowledge, 10 — 
Characteristics of scientific knowing, 10 — Characteristics of philo- 
sophic knowing, 12 — Objections to philosophy, 13 — The limitations 
of science, 14 — Science and philosophy, 14. 

Conditions of philosophic knowing, 15 — Images and Concepts, 
15 — The world is in and for consciousness, 17 — Interpretation of 
energy in terms of will, 18 — Philosophy and theology, 18. 

Significant movements in the history of philosophy, 19 — Greek 
thought from Thales to Socrates, 19 — Philosophy of the Church 
Fathers, 19 — The meaning of the Middle Ages,- 20. 

The history of philosophy, 21 — The Greek and the German con- 
tributions to philosophy, 22 — Immanuel Kant, 22 — The study of 
the great masters of philosophy, 23. 

Some teachings and aims of philosophy, 25 — The philosophic 
mind, 26. 



PHILOSOPHY 



One of the most famous books ever written, and one of the 
most influential — the Metaphysics of Aristotle — opens 
with this sentence: "All men by nature are actuated with 
the desire of knowledge." This desire of knowledge and the 
wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power be- 
hind all the changes that we, with careless, question-beg- 
ging inference, call progress. They and their reactions 
upon man's other wants and needs have, since history be- 
gan, wholly altered the appearance of the dwelling place 
of man as well as man's relation to his dwelling place. 
Yet the physical changes are insignificant, great and nu- 
merous as they are. The Alps that tried the endurance of 
Hannibal are the same mountains that tested the skill of 
Napoleon. The sea that was beaten by the banked oars of 
the triremes of Carthage, presents the same surface and the 
same shores to the fast-going, steam-driven vessel of to- 
day. But the air, once only a zephyr or a hurricane, is now 
the bearer of man's silent message to his distant fellow. 
The crude ore once deeply hidden in the earth, has been 
dug and drawn and fashioned into Puck's girdle. The 
words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to 
a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading 
sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the 
printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a mil- 
lion eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears. 
Human aspiration has cast itself, chameleon-like, into the 

5 



form of noblest verse, of sweetest music, of most moving 
oratory, of grandest painting, of most splendid architec- 
ture, of serenest reflection, of freest government. And the 
end is not yet. 

The forces — the desire for knowledge and wonder — 
that have so moved man's world, and are so moving it, must 
be treated with at least the respect due to age and to great 
achievement. 

The naive consciousness of man has always told him that 
the existence of that consciousness and its forms were the 
necessary framework for his picture of himself and his 
world. Long before Kant proved that macht zwar Ver- 
stand die Natur^ aber er schafft sie nichtj man had acted 
instinctively on the principle. The world that poured into 
his consciousness through the senses, Locke's windows of 
the soul, was accepted as he found it, and for what the 
senses did not reveal man fashioned explanations in the 
forge of his imagination. 

The unseen powers of heaven and earth, of air and water, 
of earthquake and thunderbolt, were like himself, but 
greater, grander. They had human loves and hates, 
human jealousies and ambitions. Behind the curtain of 
events they played their game of superhuman life. Offer- 
ings and gifts won their aid and their blessing; neglect or 
disdain brought down their antagonism and their curses. 
So it was that the desire for knowledge and the wonder of 
man made the mythologies; each mythology bearing the 
image of that racial facet of humanity's whole by which it 
was reflected. The Theogony^ ascribed to Hesiod, shows 
the orderly completeness to which these mythologies at- 
tained. 

The mythologies represent genuine reflection and not a 
little insight. They reveal man's simple, naive conscious- 
ness busying itself with the explanation of things. The 



mythologies were genuine and their gods and their heroes 
were real, by every test of genuineness and reality known 
to the uncritical mental processes which fashioned them. 

Change and decay, growth, life and death, are the phases 
of experience that most powerfully arouse man's wonder 
and stimulate his desire to know. Where do men and 
things come from? How are they made? How do they 
grow? What becomes of them after their disappearance 
or death?— these are the questions for which an answer is 
sought. The far away Indian in his Upanishads cried out, 
"Is Brahman the cause? Whence are we born? Whereby 
do we live, and whither do we go? O, ye who know Brah- 
man, tell us at whose command we abide, whether in pain 
or in pleasure!" To these questions the mythologies of- 
fered answers which were sufficient for long periods of 
time, and which are today sufficient for a great portion, 
perhaps by far the greater portion, of the human race. 

An important step, far-reaching in its consequences, was 
taken when man first sought the cause of change and decay 
in things themselves and in the laws which appeared to 
govern things, rather than in powers and forces outside of 
and beyond them. When the question was first asked. 
What is it that persists amid all changes and that under- 
lies every change? a new era was about to dawn in the 
history of man's wonder and his desire to know. Thales, 
who first asked this question and first offered an answer to 
it, deserves his place at the head of the list of the Seven 
Wise Men of Greece. After Thales the wise men of 
Greece left off telling tales and busied themselves with an 
examination of experience and with direct reflection upon 
it. 

It is to be noticed, however, that the evidence of the 
senses is no longer accepted at its face value. With Thales 
something new comes into view. It is the systematic search 
for the explanation of things that appear, with the assump- 

7 



tion that the explanation lies behind the appearances them- 
selves and is concealed by them. But as yet, man's gaze 
was wholly outward. The relation of the nature that he 
observed to his own consciousness was implied, but un- 
questioned. Consciousness itself and the knowing process 
remained to be examined. To turn man's gaze from out- 
ward to inward, to change the center of gravity of his de- 
siire to know, of his wonder, from nature to man himself, 
was the service of Socrates. That man is a reasoning ani- 
mal, that knowledge must be examined and tested by 
standards of its own, and that conduct must be founded 
on rational principles, are the immortal teachings of So- 
crates, as much needed now as when he first unfolded them. 
They mark him forever as the discoverer of the intellectual 
life. Of Socrates it may truly be said, in the stately verse 
of ^schylus, 

I brought to earth the spark of heavenly fire, 
Concealed at first, and small, but spreading soon 
Among the sons of men, and burning on, 
Teacher of art and use, "and fount of power. 

( Prometheus Vinctus, 1 09) 

The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," 
is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of 
men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings 
who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only 
those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the cen- 
turies. The others are a superior kind of cattle. 

The intellectual life, once discovered, was eagerly pur- 
sued by the two men who have done most to shape the 
thought of the Western World. For two generations the 
brilliant insight and noble imagery of Plato and the per- 
sistently accurate analytic and synthetic powers of Aris- 
totle poured out for the use of men the rapid results of 

8 



wide observation, profound reflection and subtlest intel- 
lectual sympathy. For nearly two thousand years the 
scholars of the world could find little else to occupy them 
than the problems which Plato and Aristotle had proposed 
and the solutions which they had offered. The weight of 
their authority was so great that it prevented the spirit of 
new inquiry from rising to its feet for a period longer than 
half of all recorded history. 

In a general way, different types of problem were 
marked off from each other during the whole of this long 
period of development and study, but the lines of distinc- 
tion that seem clear today were not often noticed or fol- 
lowed. Questions as to an unseen and superior power, as 
to logical processes, and as to natural objects and laws 
were curiously intermingled. Astronomy, mathematics, 
mechanics and medicine broke off one by one from the par- 
ent stem, but it was a long time before the other separate 
sciences that we moderns know, were able to follow them. 
Both Plato and Aristotle had indicated the distinction be- 
tween the different orders of human thinking which is all- 
controlling, but neither they nor their most influential suc- 
cessors maintained the distinction consistently by any 
means. So it happened that what we call science, what we 
call philosophy, and what we call theology were for a long 
time inextricably mixed. To no inconsiderable extent they 
remain so today. To disentangle them is the first step to- 
ward comprehending what philosophy is and what part it 
has to play in the intellectual life. 

There are three separate stages or orders of thinking 
manifested by man. At the first stage, the human mind 
sees only a world of separate and independent objects. 
These objects are grouped in certain roughly marked 
visible and audible ways, or by the pleasure or pain, the 
comfort or discomfort, that they cause ; but their likenesses 



and unlikenesses and their possible interrelationships are 
of very subordinate importance. They in no wise limit, 
alter, or interfere with the separateness of the objects 
themselves or with what is called their reality. Each elm 
tree seems a real object, an integer, an independent thing. 
A falling apple suggests not a universal law of nature but 
a means of gratifying an individual appetite. Such rela- 
tions as one of these separate things appears to have, are 
looked upon as quite secondary, even if they are ap- 
prehended at all. This is the stage of naive, uncritical 
knowledge. It lies below the horizon of the intellectual 
life. It is characteristic of the child and of the countless 
millions of unreflecting adults. It has been dignitied by 
the name common sense. Its proper designation is com- 
mon ignorance. The intellectual life begins when it is left 
behind. 

At the second stage or order of thinking the world ap- 
pears as something quite different. Instead of a world of 
fixed and definite objects whose interrelations are unim- 
portant, the mind now sees that every thing is in relation 
to every other thing and that relations are of massive sig- 
nificance, indeed that they are controlling. The elm tree, 
far from being a simple and single unit, is now recognized 
as an organic form of being, a congeries of cells, of atoms 
of carbon, of oxygen, of hydrogen, no one of which the un- 
aided human eye can see, much less the untutored human 
mind grasp. A falling apple no longer suggests merely 
the gratification of an appetite ; it illustrates the laws which 
bind the universe into coherent unity. So-called common 
sense is staggered by the revelations that this higher form 
of knowing presses upon it and insists that it accept, with 
or without comprehension. It is now seen that no object 
is independent. Each depends on every other, and de- 
pendence, relativity, is the controlling principle of the uni- 
verse. Under the guidance of Newton, reinforced by the 

10 



discoveries of a Helmholtz and a Kelvin, this stage or order 
of knowing now goes so far as to say that dependence, 
relativity, is so absolute, that if even the slightest of ob- 
jects be disturbed in position or altered in mass, the outer- 
most rim of the material universe will be affected thereby ; 
and measurably so, if only our instruments of precision 
were able for the task. The point of view, the method and 
the results of this second stage or order of knowing are 
science. 

It can now be seen how little truth there is in Huxley's 
much-quoted dictum that science is organized common 
sense. That is precisely what science is not. Science is a 
wholly different kind of knowledge from common sense, 
and it contradicts common sense at almost every point. 
To common sense, the sun revolves about the earth; to 
science, the contrary is established fact. To common 
sense, a plank is still and stable; to science it is a huge 
group of rapidly revolving centers of energy. To common 
sense, water is a true element; to science, it is a com- 
pound of atoms of the familiar hydrogen and oxygen. 
To common sense, the Rosetta stone is a bit of rock covered 
with more or less regular markings, probably for a decora- 
tive purpose; to science it is the key to a forgotten lan- 
guage and the open door to the knowledge of a lost civiliza- 
tion. Even when common sense recognizes certain simple 
relations of dependence, it has no realization of their mean- 
ing and it is without the power of analysis needed to climb 
to the higher plane of science. Here rule the stern laws 
that scientific knowing has discovered in its objects. The 
laws of cause and effect, of the persistence of force, of the 
indestructibility of matter — these and their derivatives 
bring the known world of relations and related objects 
under their sway. Anxiously, eagerly, untiringly, one 
field of intellectual interest after another is added to the 
domain of science, familiar facts are explained by strange 

11 



and unfamiliar laws, the obvious and the apparent are 
traced back to hidden and indeed invisible causes. The 
human mind, as intelligent, glows with pride at the glad 
discovery that the nature which invites and tempts it, is 
intelligible, that it is made in the mind's own image. 

At the third stage or order of knowing the world or cos- 
mos appears in still another aspect. It is now seen as Total- 
ity. When the world is viewed as Totality there is ob- 
viously nothing to which it can be related, nothing on 
which it can be dependent, no source from which its energy 
can be derived. We pass, therefore, at this stage of know- 
ing, from the plane of interdependence, relativity, to the 
plane of self-dependence, self -relation, self -activity. Self- 
active Totality is the source or origin of all the energies 
and forces and motions which in one manifestation or an- 
other are observed in their interrelations and interde- 
pendences by the stage or order of knowing which is science. 
The unrefuted and, I venture to think, the irrefutable ar- 
guments of Plato in the Tenth Book of the Laws and of 
Aristotle in the Eleventh Book of the Metaphysics, sup- 
ported by twenty-five centuries of human experience and 
the insights of one great thinker, poet and spiritual leader 
after another, are the foundation on which this third stage 
or order of knowing rests. Its habit of mind, its stand- 
point, and its insights are philosophy. Just as science is 
marked off from common sense and raised above it by anal- 
ysis and the laws of relativity, so philosophy is marked off 
from science and raised above it by farther analysis and 
the laws of self -relation. In proceeding from common 
sense to science we exchange a chaos of separate units for 
an ordered whole of interdependent parts; in proceeding 
from science to philosophy we exchange the working hy- 
potheses of the understanding for the guiding insights of 
the reason. 

There are those, however, who offer stubborn resistance 

12 



to the proposal to pass from the second stage or order of 
knowing to the third, from science to philosophy. They 
protest that they are invited to pass from clear day-light 
into a fog, from accurate and easily-tested knowledge to 
participation in a mock battle with meaningless words. 
They recall the sterility of science mitil observation and 
experiment were set free from the tranmiels of authority 
and tradition, and they are fearful lest new and still more 
irksome bonds will somehow be put upon them. Yet these 
objectors are not worried about the Infinitesimal Analysis 
or the Calculus of the Infinite. They allow the mathe- 
matician to speak unmolested of the "eyeless observation 
of his sense-transcending world." They view without 
alarm the statement of the physicist that "the ether, elec- 
tricity, force, energy, molecule, atom, electron, are but the 
symbols of our groping thoughts, created by an inborn 
necessity of the human mind which strives to make all 
things reasonable." To this the student of philosophy says 
Amen!— and rests his case. 

That inborn necessity of the human mind which strives 
to make all things reasonable creates both science and 
philosophy. To think the world as Totality is a necessity 
of clear and adequate thinking about anything. To deny 
this, does not escape from philosophy. It is only to sub- 
stitute a certainly bad philosophy for a possibly good one. 
To refuse to admit Totality is merely to adhere to a con- 
cept of Totahty which is negative. 

It is also urged that science is false to itself if it admits 
a region or realm into which it does not or may not pene- 
trate, that to exclude science is to enthrone mystery. Just 
so the naive human consciousness might urge, for the final- 
ity of its point of view, that the elm tree is a real unit, that 
the sun does move aroimd the earth, that water is a genuine 
element, for the senses tell it so, and that to refuse to be- 
lieve the evidence of the senses is to throw down the one 

13 



sure barrier between the real and the unreal. The answer 
of science is simple enough. It replies that it does not deny 
the evidence of the senses, but only inquires what is really 
involved in that which the senses report. So philosophy, 
far from being at war with science, accepts its point of 
view and its results, and asks what do these involve and 
imply? There is certainly no region or realm into which 
science does not or ought not to aim to penetrate on the 
plane in which science moves. Its error is when it imitates 
the protest of the naive consciousness against itself, and 
appeals from a higher court to a lower one. Science will 
grow in power and in influence over the minds of men, 
and clear thinking will be greatly advanced as full realiza- 
tion is had of the meaning of the profoundly impressive 
words of Lotze: "The true source of the life of science is 
to be found ... in showing how absolutely universal is 
the extent, and at the same time how completely subordi- 
nate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has 
to fulfil in the structure of the world." 

In other words, science is a subordinate category. When 
science offers itself as the final stage or form of knowing, 
it is guilty of a false quantity, in that it puts the accent, 
which belongs elsewhere, upon the penultimate. 

The history of man's intellectual development is in no 
small part a record of the relations and interrelations be- 
tween scientific and philosophic knowing, between science 
and philosophy. Both had a common historic origin, both 
have received massive contributions from the same minds. 
Each has tried in vain to supplant and to dispossess the 
other. No exercises of the human understanding are so 
futile as those to deduce or construct an explanation of 
natural phenomena as interrelated, with eyes and mind 
alike tight-closed to observation and experiment. This is 
the meaning of Bacon's much-quoted aphorism: Natura 
enim non nisi parendo vincitur. On the other hand, no 

14 



exercises of the human understanding are so pathetically 
incompetent as those to make the laws governing the inter- 
related parts serve for self -related Totality. 

The fact that the heavy hand of authority made use of 
philosophy as a weapon to combat science and its preten- 
sions, as science began to grow into self -consciousness, ex- 
plains much of the antagonism between science and phi- 
losophy which has marked the past five hundred years. 
The fact that men of science have not infrequently re- 
garded philosophy as an outworn form of human super- 
stition, gives ground for an understanding of the con- 
tempt for science which representatives of philosophy have 
sometimes permitted themselves to express. 

Today, however, he who wishes may see clearly that 
each, science and philosophy, has a field of its own, that 
both are necessary to the completeness of the intellectual 
life, that the sure advance of either is a source of strength 
to the other, and that the more stupendous their achieve- 
ments the more impressive the rationality of the universe 
is seen to be. 

Philosophic thinking presents difficulties peculiar to it- 
self because by its very nature it must dispense with the 
aid of images or mental pictures. It deals with concepts. 
Much irrational criticism of philosophy and not a little bad 
philosophy are directly traceable to the confusion of images 
and concepts, of imagination and conception. The state- 
ment that a given thing is inconceivable, that it cannot be 
grasped in thought, will usually be found to mean that It 
is unimaginable, that it cannot be pictured. Herbert 
Spencer falls into this error at a critical point in his argu- 
ment. This initial error and his unquestioning acceptance, 
through lack of knowledge of Kant, of Hamilton's and 
Mansel's grotesque application of a portion of Kant's 
teachings, cause Herbert Spencer's splendid work for the 

15 



coordination and synthesis of the sciences to fall short of 
being philosophy at all. The more acute-minded Bishop 
Berkeley made the same error in regard to images and 
concepts, and thereby failed to advance philosophy as his 
great natural powers so well qualified him to do. 

The beginner in the study of geometry is taught the dis- 
tinction between the concept of a triangle and its image or 
picture. He uses in his demonstration of the properties of 
a triangle only those characteristics of the particular figure 
that he draws or makes, which are common to all triangles. 
Neither the length of the sides nor the size of the angles is 
taken into account. His demonstration would hold good 
if a triangular figure of any other sort or size were sub- 
stituted for that which he is using. The particular figure 
or image is only a symbol of the concept triangle ; it has no 
significance of its own. The concept, triangle, is the essen- 
tial thing. It is the rule or definition according to which 
all particular triangles, or images of triangles, are made, 
whatever the length or disposition of their sides or the size 
of their angles. To grasp this distinction between concepts 
and images and to comprehend the relation between them, 
is essential to philosophic thinking of any sort. For ex- 
ample, the image, water, is a mental picture of some par- 
ticular appearance of water. It may perhaps be the roll- 
ing and turbulent ocean, a placid lake, or a tumbling 
mountain brook. The concept, water, includes the rising 
of moisture from earth or sea, its gathering into clouds, its 
condensation into falling rain, its pools, its streams, its 
great lakes and seas; its hardening into ice at one tem- 
perature, its passing off in steam at another; its composi- 
tion of hydrogen and oxygen ; its every manifestation and 
characteristic. The concept brings to mind that process, 
that transforming energy, which restlessly reveals itself 
now in one form or mass of water, now in another. It deals 
with that which persists when any given form or manif esta- 

16 



tion of water passes away. The concept represents the 
process, the energy, which is at hand whenever and wherever 
water appears ; the image represents a particular and tran- 
sitory appearance. 

When this point is reached the student of philosophy is 
really beginning to think. He has laid the foundation for 
a standard of values, for judgments of worth as distin- 
guished from judgments of fact. He has caught sight of 
the real difference between the permanent and the transitory. 

Philosophic knowing, like scientific knowing and the 
imcritical knowledge of the child, is compassed about by 
the forms of consciousness, and its results like those of 
science, are cast in these forms. Above and outside of 
these forms no knowing can by any possibility go. The 
suggestion is sometimes made in serious fashion that be- 
fore consciousness was developed, the nature and appear- 
ance of the world were of certain kind. The statement is 
not only unimaginable, but inconceivable as well. The 
words mean nothing. An instant's reflection shows that 
consciousness, which has supposedly not yet been devel- 
oped, is peeping from behind a curtain in yonder cloud to 
see how the world is getting on without it. The world is 
in and for consciousness, and no possible jugghng with 
words can shake this final foundation on which all our 
knowing, of every kind, is built. Put consciousness out of 
the door and it is instantly back through the window. 
This explains why philosophy interprets in terms of will — 
the name for the only energy that consciousness knows di- 
rectly—the energy which so abundantly and so marvel- 
ously manifests itself on every hand in nature and in his- 
tory. The conscious effort of moving the hand, the head, 
the eye, is the type and norm by which we interpret, as the 
results of energy, the changes of position and of mass 
which we so incessantly observe. 

17 



The concepts of force and energy are of necessity re- 
ferred to the concept of will as their explanation. More- 
over, in the course of the development of the forms of life 
we find irritability, a form of energy which we must inter- 
pret in terms of will, long before we find anything ap- 
proaching a manifestation of intelligence. Intelligence 
appears either as a later development out of will, or as a 
graft upon it. A weighty group of modern physicists be- 
lieve that matter itself, in its ultimate state, may be ana- 
lyzed into energy, which again is only humanly explainable 
as will. 

A strong, and in my view, the dominant tendency in 
philosophy, powerfully supported by the results of scien- 
tific knowing, is that which sees Totality as energy, which 
is will. Perpetual motion is clearly impossible, from a 
mechanical point of view, at the scientific stage of know- 
ing. Just because of this fact, all mechanical motion can 
only be explained as having originated as will-force. This 
will-force is self -active Totality. The ethical and the 
metaphysical, as well as the theological results and im- 
plications of this conclusion, are of the first order of im- 
portance. 

There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily 
accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theol- 
ogy and religion. It is usually said that while philosophy 
is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion 
is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective 
mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy 
with philosophies, a common and, it must be admitted, a 
not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the 
creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a 
Hegel, philosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and lan- 
guage, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is 
advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpreta- 

18 



tions and syntheses, but it is none the less quite distinct 
from such individual contributions. Philosophy is human- 
ity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more help- 
ful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual 
vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more nu- 
merous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a par- 
ticular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms 
of God and His activities. In the impressive words of 
Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks 
"to bind together objects and events in the links of neces- 
sary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in 
that which comprehends and transcends all — the nature of 
God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the 
adoration of the God Whom theology postulates. 

If the whole history of philosophy be searched for ma- 
terial with which to instruct the beginner in what philo- 
sophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, 
the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as 
useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to 
Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ 
by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church 
Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see 
the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe 
was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a na- 
tural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpreta- 
tion of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process 
is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable 
introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the 
second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the lite- 
rally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, 
intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and 
building the great system of creeds and thought which has 
immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil 
and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given 

19 



color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly 
two thousand years. For the student of today both these 
developments have great practical value, and the astonish- 
ing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discredit- 
able. 

The student of philosophy is more fortunate than some 
of his contemporaries in his attitude toward the period 
called the Middle Ages. 

The very use of the name Middle Ages to describe a 
group of ten centuries is sufficient evidence that those cen- 
turies are neither understood nor appreciated. The mod- 
ern world at the time of its beginnings reacted so sharply 
and so eniphatically against the methods and ideals which 
had guided the civilization of the centuries that went be- 
fore, that for the time being the laws of evolution were for- 
gotten and the attempt was made to break completely with 
the past and to begin the history of civilization anew. The 
student of philosophy, however, finds in the so-called Mid- 
dle Ages a rich field for study and contemplation. He sees 
there the mind of modern Europe at school. It is learn- 
ing to think and to use the tools of thought. It is sharp- 
ening and refining language, and the nations that are to be 
are making each a language of its own. The view of life 
which Christian theology then taught with marvelous uni- 
formity was working its way into the consciousness of those 
Northern peoples who had both overthrown the Roman 
civilization and been overwhelmed by it, and was the con- 
trolhng power in their lives. 

To suppose that such an age as this can be properly de- 
scribed as dark, is only to invite attention to the limitations 
of one's own knowledge and sympathy. No age was dark 
in any true sense that witnessed the assembling of scholars 
at the feet of Alcuin and Hrabanus Maurus, that saw the 
rise of universities, of guilds and of cities, that was fired by 
the enthusiasm and the zeal of St. Dominic and St. Fran- 

20 



cis, that gave birth to the story of the Cid, of the Holy 
Grail, of the Nibelungen Lied, and the divine comedy of 
Dante, that witnessed those triumphs of Gothic architec- 
ture that still delight each eye that rests upon them, or that 
knew the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Magna Charta 
and the legal Commentaries of Bracton. Such an age as 
this is perhaps not one with which any century since the 
17th stands in close sympathy, but it is neither a dark age 
nor a middle age. It has significance and value of its own. 
It witnessed the preparation of the mind of Europe for 
what was to come, and it is not poor but rich in evidences of 
culture and reflection. This is particularly true in the 
domains of philosophy and of literature. The student of 
philosophy does not overlook this fact. 

Any study of philosophy that is worth while will lay 
strong emphasis on a knowledge of the historical develop- 
ment of philosophic thought. It will dwell upon the in- 
fluence of philosophy upon the activities of men, from the 
time of its crude beginnings by the shores of Virgil's 

—Sails pladdi vultum fluctusque quietos 

to the crowded, hastening, electric-bound world of today. 
For the history of philosophy is in fact, as Professor Fer- 
rier once said it was, "philosophy itself taking its time, 
and seen through a magnifying glass." Against the back- 
ground of the centuries man's efforts to grasp and to ex- 
plain TotaKty, of which he is a part, stand out in splendid 
illumination. The two greatest and most enduring 
achievements are easily seen to have been the work of the 
Greek and the German minds. The cosmological method 
of the one and the psychological method of the other, when 
brought together in synthesis, offer us the deepest insights 
of which humanity has yet been capable. The Greek and 
the German languages are the most adequate to the expres- 

21 



sion of philosophic thinking, for the reason that these lan- 
guages mirror the powers and characteristics of the racial 
groups that brought them into being. In making their 
weighty contributions to philosophy, the Greek and the 
German peoples evolved language-forms competent to 
give expression to their profoundest thoughts. Their four 
chief representatives— Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel — 
tower, like mountain peaks above the plain, over all others 
who have given voice, in systematic form, to man's highest 
intellectual aspirations. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aqui- 
nas, Spinoza, and perhaps also Descartes, follow a little 
distance behind. No others have climbed so far up the Hill 
Difficulty as these. 

To grasp in fullest significance the movement of con- 
temporary thought, and to pass judgment upon it with 
some approach to a proper sense of proportion, the student 
must know his Kant. Max Miiller's phrase was a good 
one: "Kant's language is the lingua franca of modern 
philosophy." It is not too much to say that without an 
understanding of Kant the door to a just appreciation of 
modern thought is closed. The reason for this judgment 
is that the adequacy of most modern thinking is to be tested 
primarily by the method it pursues, and Kant is the great 
reformer of philosophical method. One may watch the 
justly emphatic Empiricism of Bacon march straight for- 
ward to its logical conclusion in the almost unlimited Scep- 
ticism of Hume. On the other hand, one may see clearly 
enough how the rationalistic method which commended it- 
self to Descartes developed of necessity into the full- 
fledged and all-inclusive Dogmatism of Christian Wolff. 
The two conflicting methods. Empiricism and Rationalism, 
resulted, at the end of something more than a hundred 
years, in two mutually contradictory sets of conclusions, 
Scepticism and Dogmatism. Each might abuse the other, 

22 



but neither could refute the other. An absolute deadlock 
was presented by the thought of the 18th century as it 
found expression on the one hand chiefly in England, and 
on the other hand chiefly in Germany. To break this dead- 
lock there was need of some new method which could 
mediate, so to speak, between the extremes of Empiricism 
and Rationalism. That method is the critical method of 
Immanuel Kant. The story of his own intellectual devel- 
opment, the steps by which he climbed up from one point 
of view in philosophy to a higher and more inclusive one, 
until finally he produced the Kritik der reinen Vernunft^ 
is one of the most instructive and illimiinating in the whole 
history of human thinking. The student who has really 
come to an understanding of Kant, his method, and his 
contribution to philosophy, is ready for any task that re- 
flection can put upon him. 

It is said of Kant that he used to tell his students at 
Konigsberg that he sought to teach them, not philosophy, 
but how to think philosophically. This view of the teach- 
ing of philosophy, which I hold to be the correct one, is the 
reason why students of philosophy, particularly beginners, 
should concern themselves with the works of the genuine 
masters of philosophic thinking, and not waste their time 
and dissipate their energies upon the quasi-philosophical 
and the frivolously-philosophical writing, chiefly modern 
and largely contemporary, which may be not inappro- 
priately described as involving Great Journeys to the 
Homes of Little Thoughts ! 

The clever intellectual posing and attitudinizing of 
Nietzsche, whose body and mind alike were sorely 
stricken with illness, is only a travesty upon philosophy. 
The curiously barren efforts of Haeckel, when he leaves 
the field of science in which he is an adept, are but little 
better. Even the form of philosophy called Pragmatism, 

23 



for which the great names of Oxford, Harvard and Co- 
lumbia are academic sponsors, and which when unfolded 
to the man in the street leads him to howl with delight be- 
cause he at last understands things, should come late and 
not early in a student's philosophical reading. A back- 
ground of considerable philosophical knowledge will aid 
in giving to it a just appreciation. There are critics who 
have the fear that Pragmatism, in its attempt to be both 
profound and popular, may, forgetful of the ancient warn- 
ing of Plautus, suffer from attempting to blow and to 
swallow at the same time. 

The English and American student of philosophy is in 
no small measure handicapped by the fact that there is so 
little genuinely first-class philosophical writing in the Eng- 
lish language. The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic peo- 
ple have expressed themselves in much noble poetry and in 
political institutions of the greatest value and importance, 
but their positive contributions to constructive philosoph- 
ical thinking have been meager. They have at times of- 
fered the obstacle of sharp criticism and unsatisfied scep- 
ticism to the progress of obscure, extreme and unsound 
tendencies in philosophic thinking, but the stones that they 
have laid upon the permg-nent structure of philosophy are 
few. Of writers in English during the last decades of the 
19th century, the two Cairds, the two Wallaces, Green and 
Harris stand almost alone in their ability to reach really 
exceptional heights in the task of philosophic criticism and 
interpretation. They have all enjoyed the advantages of 
what is so conspicuously lacking in most contemporary 
writing on philosophy, namely, broad and deep philosoph- 
ical scholarship. After the human race has been at work 
on its chief problem for thousands of years, the man who 
ignores all that has been accomplished and is consumed 
with an ambition to be original, is pretty certain to end by 
being simply queer. 

24 



It would be a grateful task, did opportunity offer, to 
point to some of the conclusions of philosophy which seem 
to me to be the surest: to show that nothing less than an 
eternal moral order will satisfy our deepest human needs 
or our loftiest human aspirations, an eternal moral order 
which is the final test of all theories and explanations; to 
urge the significance of the testimony of the human heart 
to our dependence on a higher power, testimony voiced 
alike in the opening verses of the poem of Lucretius 
written while Csesar lived and TuUy spoke, and in the 
sweet and tender music of Cardinal Newman's JLead, 
Kindly Light, of Lord Tennyson's Crossing the Bur, and 
of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional, testimony recorded 
boldly and ineffaceably in the countless sainted lives that 
have been lived on this earth; to read the lesson of man's 
unconquerable optimism, his 

— trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill 

which, despite all temptations, has thus far kept him from 
framing any scheme for education, politics or society upon 
the hypothesis that the influences making for evil in the 
world will fin$,lly conquer ; to make plain the full meaning 
of the dictum of Hegel that "the whole of philosophy is 
nothing but the study of specific forms or types of unity," 
and to illustrate the principle of Spinoza that "a thing has 
only so much reality as it possesses power" ; to bring evi- 
dence to prove the fact that philosophy does for the 
thought which combines and unifies things what science 
does for the facts or things combined and unified; to trace 
the hand of philosophy in architecture, in painting and 
sculpture, in poetry and in the political and religious insti- 
tutions that mankind has made ; to follow down the course 
of events in the Western World and to illustrate how true 
is the saying of Thucydides that history is philosophy 

25 



learned from examples; to indicate the close relations be- 
tween philosophy and the logic which is mathematics, rela- 
tions felt or suspected by Pythagoras and Plato, by Des- 
cartes and Spinoza, by Leibnitz and Kant, and to suggest 
ways in which mathematics can and does lead from science 
to philosophy and binds them together; to reveal the laws 
of evolution as significant and vital principles in philos- 
ophy long before the sciences of nature discovered and 
proved the existence of the same or similar laws in their 
own sphere; to throw light upon the deepest cleavage 
known to history — that between Orient and Occident — by 
contrasting the civilization based upon a philosophy that 
cannot account for or explain independent individuals, 
that holds any appearance of such to be Maya, illusion, and 
that longs for return to and absorption in Nirvana, with 
that civilization which is based upon a philosophy that 
does account for and explain independent individuals, and 
that calls on them to exert and develop themselves to the 
utmost in order to approach nearer to intellectual and 
moral perfection. All this, and much more, philosophy 
endeavors to teach. 

More than seventy years ago De Tocqueville expressed 
the opinion that in no country in the civilized world is less 
attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. 
At that time he was right, but, fortunately, he is right no 
longer. Philosophy is now vigorously prosecuted among 
us. Wordsworth's "years that bring the philosophic 
mind," are bringing it in some measure to us. We must 
cultivate and encourage that philosophic mind, for we are 
sorely in need of it to bring unity into our knowledge, to 
install securely principle in the judgment-seat before 
which conflicting practices are the contentious litigants, to 
gain a sense of proportion and a point of view in the study 
of history and of nature, and to set final foot on the head 

26 



of the dragon Philistinism that everywhere assails worth 
in the name of "that which works." Perhaps we may ven- 
tm-e even to cherish the hope that, in Victor Hugo's well- 
known phrase, Ceci tuera cela! 

We need philosophy, too, to aid us to gain that even 
mind in things severe that Horace counsels, and to help 
us to see life steadily and see it whole, as Matthew Arnold 
sang of Sophocles. The modern world has sat at the feet 
of the ancient world for a long time, but it has not yet 
learned all that the ancient world has to teach. 

To carry into science and philosophy the presuppositions 
of uncritical knowledge is to lead ourselves into curious 
vagaries and contradictions, unless we can rise above or 
outgrow such presuppositions. Education is in no small 
measure preparing the way for the intellectual life and 
pointing to it. Those who cannot enter in at its gates are 
doomed, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, to "possess neither 
the profit nor the beauty of the world." For them life 
must be short, however many its years, and barren, however 
plentiful its acts. Their ears are deaf to the call of the in- 
dwelling Reason and their eyes are blind to all the mean- 
ings and the values of human experience. Where there is 
no vision, the people — and the university — perish! 



27 



VIAR 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 



A SERIES of twenty-two lectures descriptive in untechnical language of 
the achievements in Science, Philosophy and Art, and indicating the 
present status of these subjects as concepts of human knowledge, are being 
delivered at Columbia University, during the academic year 1907-1908, by 
various professors chosen to represent the several departments of instruction, 

MATHEMATICS, by Cassius Jackson Keyser, Adrain Professor of Mathe- 
matics. 

PHYSICS, by Ernest Fox Nichols, Professor of Experimental Physics. 

CHEMISTRY, by Charles F. Chandler, Professor of Chemistry. 

ASTRONOMY, by Harold Jacoby, Rutherfurd Professor of Astronomy. 

GEOLOGY, by James Furman Kemp, Professor of Geology. 

BIOLOGY, by Edmund B. Wilson, Professor of Zoology. 

PHYSIOLOGY, by Frederic S. Lee, Professor of Physiology. 

BOTANY, by Herbert Maule Richards, Professor of Botany. 

ZOOLOGY, by Henry E. Crampton, Professor of Zoology. 

ANTHROPOLOGY, by Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology. 

ARCHAEOLOGY, by James Rignall Whedev, Professor of Greek Archae- 
ology and Art. 

HISTORY, by James Harvey Robinson, Professor of History. 

ECONOMICS, by Henry Rogers Seager, Professor of Political Economy. 

POLITICS, by Charles A. Beard, Adjunct Professor of Politics. 

JURISPRUDENCE, by Munroe Smith, Professor of Roman Law and 
Comparative Jurisprudence. 

SOCIOLOGY, by Franklin Henry Giddings, Professor of Sociology. 

PHILOSOPHY, by Nicholas Murray Butler, President of the University. 

PSYCHOLOGY, by Robert S. Woodworth, Adjunct Professor of Psy- 
chology. • 

METAPHYSICS, by Frederick J. E. Woodbfidge, Johnsonian Professor of 
Philosophy. 

ETHICS, by John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy. 

PHILOLOGY, by A. V. W. Jackson, Professor ' of Indo-Iranian Lan- 
guages. 

LITERATURE, by Harry Thurston Peck, Anthon Professor of the Latin 
Language and Literature. 

These lectures are published by the Columbia University Press separately in 
pamphlet form, at the uniform price of twenty-five cents, by mail twenty-eight 
cents. Orders will be taken for the separate pamphlets, or for the whole series. 

Address 
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Columbia University, New York 



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